warning to foraging natives. Their skulls, together with that of another beheaded woman, were exchanged for 30 shillings and a gallon of rum each in Sydney, according to the recollections of William Byrne in 1903, and were sent to England where they were lodged for study at Edinburgh University, and were only returned recently, in 1991 and 2000, and negotiations have been underway for over a decade to have the remains, in Canberra, buried. The area believed to be the site where the Appin Massacre took place was returned to the local Aboriginal community by an act of Parliament. In 1828, there was some interaction between the Surveyor-General, Thomas Mitchell, and the Gandangara, near Mittagong. Mitchell was supervising road construction. The Gandarangara are said to have composed a cheeky song about the building of the road (perhaps with appropriate mimicry): Road goes creaking long shoes, Road goes uncle and brother white man see. It must have seemed that building a road just to visit kin was unnecessary effort. Men from the Gandarangara also acted as guides for Mitchell at the time. Notwithstanding the attempts to disperse, round them up, or kill them under Macquarie's direction, the Gandangara population, able to take refuge in the tough hinterlands like the Burragorong, have sustained itself as an organized social group somewhat better than other neighbouring peoples like the Dharug, for in the 1860s they returned to demand restitution of their lands. Remnants of the Gandangara lived at Burragorang on the Wollondilly River, where they were interviewed in the early 1900s by the ethnographer R. H. Mathews, who took down some of their legendary lore. Beliefs According to Gandangara belief, in the primordial dreamtime (gun-yung-ga-lung, "times far past"), two creator figures, Gurangatch, a rainbow serpent, and Mirragañ, a quoll, went on a journey from a point on the upper reaches of the Wollondilly River, with Mirragan pursuing the former, until the trek ended at a waterhole named Joolundoo on the Upper Fish River. The distance covered by this serpentine movement and the pursuit extended some away. Much of this landscape with its minute Gandangara toponymic descriptions considered to be "one of the best documented Aboriginal cultural landscapes", was submerged with the construction of the Warragamba Dam after WW2. At that time animals were human, and collectively the animal people of that pristine world were known as Burringilling. Gurangatch, not wholly a serpent, but part